


More than Necessity

by lirin



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, inventions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 15:52:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13720971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: In her lab, Shuri finds five good reasons to invent something, and one reason that doesn't work.





	More than Necessity

### 1\. pranking your brother

It was a quiet, uneventful sort of day. Nobody on the Council had made any requests of the Design Group in weeks, so Shuri could work on whatever she pleased. However, her options were limited because several of her biggest projects had been sent to the prototypers and weren't back yet. Nakia's disc blades needed rebalancing, but Shuri didn't think she felt like working with weapons today.

Come to think of it, there wasn't anything she particularly felt like working on today. But she couldn't just do nothing. T'Challa would be visiting her lab this afternoon, and he'd be sure to tease her about being lazy if she let anything slip when he asked her what she'd done today. She sat down at one of her workbenches and pulled out a fresh piece of vibranium. Vibranium...T'Challa...2πr... As she turned the smooth metal between her hands, an idea came to her. She picked up her tools and set to work.

 

"I made something for you," she greeted T'Challa at the door to the lab. She held it out: pure vibranium sculpted into a narrow ring, around four inches in diameter and engraved with subtle patterns.

"What does it do?" T'Challa asked.

"It goes around your wrist," Shuri said. 

Of course that wasn't actually an answer to the question he had asked, but she'd been showing off inventions to her brother for a long time, and T'Challa was used to the way she would demonstrate instead of telling him how they worked. He slipped the ring around his wrist. As soon as it contacted skin, it snugged down automatically, so that it just skimmed the skin right above his wrist bone. T'Challa looked at it for a few seconds, and when it didn't do anything else, he turned back to her. "So what does it do?"

"It's a bracelet," Shuri said triumphantly.

"A bracelet," T'Challa echoed, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. "Does it do anything?"

"Well..." Shuri grinned. "Now take it off."

"It's not going to blow my hand up, is it?"

"Would I do that to you?"

He shook his head. "You know better than that, I'm sure." He pushed the bracelet back toward his hand. "How do I get it to expand again so I can take it off?"

"You can't," Shuri said. "That's the point of it, it's a bracelet that doesn't come off."

T'Challa stared at her silently as her words sank in.

"Bet you can't figure out how to remove it before your speech on Friday," Shuri said, still grinning. "Don't worry, I'll help you pick an outfit that matches it."

 

### 2\. to help people

It seemed that every time Shuri saw Nakia now, she was leaving. Not that there were even very many times she saw her. Sometimes, the only sign of Nakia's visit would be a note left on Shuri's workbench: "Borrowed a knife and a shield. Headed to Guyana to investigate a lead." But this time, Shuri was working late, and so she was still in the lab when Nakia slipped in through a side door.

"Don't you want to stay a few days?" Shuri said. "You could say hi to my brother when he and Baba return from Vienna."

Nakia shook her head. "I can do more good outside Wakanda than I can here," she said. "And every day I would tarry here, there would be people out there whom I could help who would have to go without my aid."

"And so you've come to say goodbye?" Shuri said. "Or were you just hoping to borrow some of my weaponry?"

"I don't want to take any weapons this time," Nakia said. "I'm not taking anything for communication either, or anything else that might betray that I am not who I claim to be."

"So then what brings you to my lab?"

"I don't want to leave Wakanda behind completely," Nakia said. "I was hoping you might have some sort of tracker that nobody would notice but that would let those I leave behind know my location. Just in case."

Shuri frowned in thought. "I don't have anything of that sort on hand, but if you can wait a few hours, it wouldn't take me long to put something together. I could put it in a bracelet, or in a pin you could hide in one of your hair knots."

"Could the pin be small enough to be completely concealed?" Nakia asked. "A bracelet might be lost or attract attention."

"I could make the tracker microscopic, except it might get lost," Shuri said. "I'll make a very tiny pin and then we can use a dab of glue or something to make sure it won't fall out."

"That would be acceptable," Nakia said. "Thank you for your help."

 

### 3\. wardrobe malfunction

T'Challa always liked to give Shuri a hard time about her outfits, but that was only because he was her big brother and big brothers had to have something to tease about. As a matter of fact, Shuri had very good taste when it came to clothes, and the outfits she sourced from all over the world and sometimes made herself were more stylish than anything T'Challa ever wore.

Well, most of the time. Her current outfit, a blue jumpsuit, was suffering both in terms of style and in terms of staying in one piece. When she bought it, she'd been attracted to its mesh construction—lightweight but fine enough to remain opaque—and the beads that dangled from the legs and the sleeves. Unfortunately, either the beads were a bit too heavy or the fabric was a bit too fragile, because within an hour it had developed a several-inch-long tear above her left hip. Shuri didn't want to go all the way back to her room to change clothes. And besides, T'Challa had seen her outfit at breakfast and would be sure to notice (and comment, at length) if she was dressed completely differently at lunch. Instead, she picked up a spare piece of vibranium and wove it through the torn place. Vibranium was no heavier than the fiber the mesh was made of; it would fit right in to the design. And oh, oops, it would also fit right in over here, too, on her right sleeve where she must have caught it on something and it had ripped nearly up to her elbow. Wardrobe re-intact, Shuri resumed working on her latest kimoyo bead updates.

 

There were a few more rips and tears over the next few hours, but she was on the track of something special here with the beads, and besides she'd figured out how to fix her jumpsuit now. It only took a second to weave vibranium through a tear as soon as it happened. She didn't even need to take her mind off of her work to do it.

 

"What happened to your outfit?" T'Challa greeted her at lunch. 

Shuri blinked. The whole point of not changing clothes had been for him not to notice. "What do you mean? I'm wearing the exact same thing."

"I thought it was blue this morning."

Shuri glanced down at her jumpsuit. Nearly every square inch was woven with vibranium, its silvery gleam covering the blue mesh she'd started out with. Had it really torn that much? Oops. "Oh, this? I'm testing out a new fabric. It uses vibranium, but on the macro instead of nano level. I'm testing to see whether the vibranium molecules interact differently with fabric when both substances retain proximity to their own matter for the majority instead of being substantively interlaced."

T'Challa's eyes had glazed over. For a moment, she thought he'd fallen for her technobabble.

"And here I thought you had just tried to piece your dress back together when it fell apart." 

Darn it. Time to double down. "No, definitely fabric testing. Why do you think I chose an outfit in this particular fabric in the first place?"

"I distinctly recall you telling me you were buying it because it was fashion-forward," T'Challa said.

"Well, yes. But now it's even farther forward due to my updates."

 

### 4\. puns, the highest form of humor

Shuri had nearly a dozen different versions of the Black Panther suit in her lab: some of them complete, some of them only half-prototyped, and some of them only in sketch form except for one or two pieces. There were so many things the Black Panther needed to be able to do—kicks, jumps, backflips—and the suit needed to be able to support them all. Currently she was working on a new pair of boots with spring propulsion built in to help with height on backflips. T'Challa had told her that kicks were more important, but "kickers" just didn't have the same motivational ring to it. Besides, she felt like working with springs today. 

Due to vibranium's vibration-absorption, springs made of vibranium were completely different from normal springs. A combination of vibranium and steel springs had potential; while both provided force in the same direction, the force acted at different speeds and in different manners, and ended up combining to provide more force than either would alone.

The shape of the boot also affected the force and control behind the takeoff. After several tests, Shuri found that a base slightly wider than the human foot worked better than a narrow boot. She'd been hoping that might be the case; it fit the image she had in her head of the design.

When she'd finished the plans, she sent them off for prototyping, and put the project out of her mind. T'Challa wouldn't be back for almost a week, anyway. And the whole point of this project was to get to show it off to her brother.

 

The finished boots were delivered to her lab only the morning of the day that T'Challa returned from whatever his latest excursion had been. He arrived at her lab shortly after lunch, ostensibly just to say hello, but Shuri insisted that she had to show him all the new tech she'd developed while he'd been away.

"I'm really liking some of the kimoyo beads' new capabilities," she said proudly. "And I have some new footwear for you to try." She picked the new prototype up off her workbench and handed it to him. "They provide an extra boost when you're doing a backflip, to help you get more altitude with less effort." She watched her brother slip the boots on. The automatic latch worked perfectly, lacing itself up as soon as he had the boot halfway settled on his foot. He bounced up and down a few times, testing the springs. Then with a bound, he flipped himself over her workbench, bounced off the wall, and backflipped off the top of the wall to land next to her again.

"They work quite well," he said. He bent over to take the boots off again.

"I'm glad you think so. I call them flippers."

T'Challa froze with the boot half off. He looked back up at her slowly. "Flippers?"

"Because they help you with flips?"

With an exaggerated sigh of longsuffering, T'Challa resumed taking off the boots.

That reaction had definitely been worth the work of inventing. And besides, the boots would be pretty useful regardless of the name. She'd have to come up with something else punny. Slippers? No, slipping was unlikely to be a desirable feature. Rulers? The name was entertaining but she wasn't sure what an item with that name would do. There wasn't much need for the Black Panther to do even low-tech measuring, much less the sort of high-tech measurement that would come out of her laboratory. Sneakers? Now that had some possibilities...

 

### 5\. Wakanda Forever

Wakanda was a peaceful nation, but a nation could be grateful for peace and still prepared for war. It was a complicated world out there, and one never knew what dangers might approach when they were least expected. And so Shuri developed weapons, to defend her family, to defend her home, and to defend her country. 

She might even have to fight herself someday, as much as her mother and her brother might wish to keep her safe at home away from trouble, only helping with supplies and communications and remote vehicle control and all such things that could be done from the safety of her lab. And so she created a few weapons that she reserved for herself, prototypes that had never made it to full production but that appealed to her sense of style. After all, if you had to fight, you might as well look cool doing it. And what was cooler than panther fists that contained sonic cannons?

She didn't show them to anyone. They were just for her, and if war ever came, she'd be ready.

 

### & 1\. because being in the Wakanda Design Group building automatically makes you feel inventive

T'Challa hadn't been at breakfast, or at lunch either. Shuri had noticed his absence, but it was easy to assume he was just busy. There was a great deal of reconstruction to be done after the battle, particularly around the mine. She hurried from place to place, overseeing rebuilding and answering questions, and she assumed her brother was doing the same.

But when she finally found a moment to go back to her lab, T'Challa was there, sitting at her workbench. The lab had been mostly cleaned up, but a few splinters of reinforced glass still lay on the benchtop. T'Challa held one in his hand, slowly turning it end to end.

"Did you need something?" Shuri said. She walked over and stood next to him, resting her hand on his shoulder. They hadn't been able to spend as much time together lately as she would have liked.

"I need to invent something," T'Challa said. "I thought this would be the best place to do it, but I've been here all day and I don't have any ideas."

"Maybe that's because I designed this laboratory to cater to and stimulate my feelings of creativity," Shuri said. "You and I have very different styles. If you had a laboratory, it would probably look completely different." She sat down at the workbench next to him, and crossed her arms. "But not to worry, little sister's here to save the day. Just tell me what you want to invent."

T'Challa shook his head. "I don't think it's something I'm ready to tell you about quite yet. But maybe..." He set down the sliver of glass and turned to face her. "How would you like to go to California with me?"

"California?" Shuri shrieked. "I'd love to! But don't you need to stay here to oversee rebuilding?"

"Rebuilding is already well underway and under control," T'Challa said. "And if anyone has any questions that can't wait, they can always contact me—but only if Okoye approves the message as sufficiently important, which I doubt she will. We can be spared for a few days."

"Great!" Shuri said. "Make sure you take a plane that's big enough for me to have a few extra suitcases—I want to do some shopping! When do we leave?"

T'Challa stood up and walked with her to the laboratory door, his arm around her shoulders. "As soon as you're ready."

Shuri hesitated, turning back to her lab. The glass wall looked unfamiliar in its tatters, but the rest of it was her domain.

"It will still be here when you come back," T'Challa said, his tone gently teasing.

Shuri hugged him. "Even if it wasn't here, I could survive without it," she said. "I'm just glad you'll still be here when I come back."


End file.
